Cost Advantage: Cost Analysis System

Cognition Corporation, has pioneered a new field of manufacturing
design, direct engineering, with its Cost Advantage software system
developed in Allegro CL. "This is a brand new area of generating
designs," says Kevin Sullivan, Director, Software Development, "based
on defining the parameters of the design beforehand. We're emerging as
the leader in direct engineering systems." Sullivan indicates that
this cutting-edge technology gives Cognition's customers a tremendous
competitive advantage and cites such companies as Peugeot, Texas
Instruments, Ford, Pratt and Whitney, Boeing, and many more as
users.

Cost Advantage is a powerful Design for Manufacturability (DFM)
expert system powered by Allegro CL. The system captures manufacturing
process knowledge and leverages that information to identify and
reduce costs at every stage of a product's life cycle.

Captures Knowledge

The Cost Advantage software system consists of three components:
Process Models, CA-Modeler, and the Cost Advantage. Process Models
consist of the collective expertise of manufacturing specialists in
the form of information and rules. This knowledge is used to estimate
costs and advise engineers on the manufacturability of product
designs.

The CA-Modeler captures the specialists' manufacturing knowledge
via the system's powerful graphical user interface. Users build and
edit process models through easy-to-use on-screen menus, eliminating
the need for computer programming skills. A natural rule language for
creating "if-then" conditions is also incorporated, allowing the
specialists to convey knowledge in a form accessible to novices and
adding intelligence to the system that guides users through the
complexities of the design process.

The Cost Advantage Module enables departments across the enterprise
(such as marketing, engineering, purchasing, etc.) to access knowledge
stored in the Process Models for the purpose of making intelligent
decisions about cost and producibility. Cost Advantage prompts the
user for product characteristics such as shape, form, finish, and
material. As the user specifies this information, the system
progressively evaluates the product for potential problems and updates
the product cost estimate. If the product has features that that are
not manufacturable by a specific process, or that are borderline for a
process and therefore more expensive, the system will alert the user
to the potential problem.

Transfers Knowledge

Cost Advantage contains an on-line explain feature that enables
users to examine a process model's underlying assumptions,
relationships, and calculations used in providing the estimates. The
feature explains why the system makes certain recommendations or why a
design's costs might escalate rapidly when using a particular
process. By educating and transferring manufacturing knowledge to the
user, that individual becomes increasingly efficient at finding
cost-effective solutions.

Allegro CL Best Development Choice

Looking back on designing the Cost Advantage system, Sullivan is
emphatic about the critical role that Allegro CL played in the
development process, particularly the importance of dynamic objects
technology: "The system captures dynamically changing scenarios such
as those you typically find in a design environment. We couldn't do
this without Lisp. We store information about classes and this
information often changes while the system is running, as the user
changes various parameters. Managing these dynamic classes is made
much easier with the use of Common Lisp."

"Additionally, Cost Advantage is designed for ease of use," says
Sullivan. "Our customers interact with the system using a
domain-specific language we built on top of Allegro CL's Common Lisp.
It's not at all required that they know how to program in Lisp. And,
Common Lisp is immensely productive to work with. We built the system
with a small number of developers, and were highly impressed with the
level of support we got-and continue to get-from Franz.

For more information about the Cost Advantage software system and
Cognition Corporation, please visit the company's web page
at
http://www.cognition.us/.